The research deals with three topics in the processing of verbal items. The first is word perception. Here we hypothesize that, when perceiving a word one's unit of processing is larger than a single letter. This perceptual unit may be akin to a syllable, and our studies of the tachistoscopic recognition of one- and two-syllable words support this possibility. The second topic concerns different perceptual strategies that may be used to process verbal items. Here we distinguish between two strategies--one which seems highly automated and primarily dependent on long-term memory, and one which seems relatively unautomated and dependent on short-term memory. The relevant experiments have consisted of demonstrating that, in a tachistoscopic recognition task, prior information can induce a subject to use the less efficient unautomated strategy. The final topic is the representation of semantic information in memory. Studies of the time needed to verify statements of the form A robin is a bird indicate that the word is represented in terms of semantic features, some of which serve mainly to characterize the concept rather than strictly define it.